In my last column,
I wrote about how the U.S. has pivoted to Asia (the administration
prefers the term “rebalanced”) because of the concern of
a rising China. In addition to China’s growing military
capabilities
[.pdf] — such as modernizing its nuclear forces (including a
development of a road mobile intercontinental ballistic missile
capable of carrying multiple independently targetable re-entry
vehicles), developing an aircraft carrier, and testing a
next-generation stealth fighter aircraft — China’s cyber
capabilities are also a serious concern. According to Military
and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of
China 2011 [.pdf]:

In 2010, numerous computer
systems around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, were the target of intrusions, some of which appear to
have originated within the PRC. …

Cyberwarfare capabilities
could serve PRC military operations in three key areas. First and
foremost, they allow data collection through exfiltration. Second,
they can be employed to constrain an adversary’s actions or
slow response time by targeting network-based logistics,
communications, and commercial activities. Third, they can serve as
a force multiplier when coupled with kinetic attacks during times of
crisis or conflict.

Developing capabilities for
cyberwarfare is consistent with authoritative PLA military writings.
Two military doctrinal writings, Science of Strategy, and Science
of Campaigns identify information warfare (IW) as integral to
achieving information superiority and an effective means for
countering a stronger foe.

More recently, Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta had this to say on ABC’s This
Week with Jake Tapper.

Tapper: The Pentagon has
acknowledged recently China is the biggest source of cyber attacks
against this country, including stealing our military secrets. Newt
Gingrich spoke about this threat on the campaign trail often. He
said cyber attacks, cyber spying, are quote, “acts of war.”
Do you agree? Are they acts of war, and how would the United
States respond?

Panetta: Well, there’s no
question that if a cyber attack, you know, crippled our power
grid in this country, took down our financial systems, took down our
government systems, that that would constitute an act of war.
[Emphasis added.]

From his first months in office,
President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks
on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear
enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first
sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the
program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate
the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named
Olympic Games — even after an element of the program
accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a
programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz
plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer
security experts who began studying the worm, which had been
developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

So let’s review.
According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, a cyberattack by a
foreign power would be considered an act of war. Yet, according to
David Sanger, “the United States has repeatedly used
cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure.”
(Panetta was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency when
the Stuxnet worm was developed and used.)

It’s hard to know where to
begin unraveling the hypocrisy of U.S. policy. The United States
has decided to shift its strategic focus to Asia because it’s worried
about China. At least part of that worry stems from China’s
cyber capabilities, and we would deem a cyber attack from China an
act of war. Yet the United States has been engaged in cyber attacks
against Iran, but somehow these should not be construed as acts of
war.

Really? You cannot be serious.

Then there’s the reason the U.S. developed and used the Stuxnet worm in the first place:
to slow down or close down Iran’s nuclear program. That
doesn’t mean that a nuclear Iran would be a good thing or
that, all things being equal, Iran should have a nuclear weapon.
But all things aren’t equal. To begin, both the U.S. and
Israel (which helped develop Stuxnet) both have nuclear weapons.
So, from Iran’s perspective, nuclear weapons might be seen as a counterweight to
Israel and a way to stave off potential U.S.-imposed regime change. What
do Iraq and Afghanistan (Iran’s neighbors on its flanks) have
in common? Both were the benefactors of regime change via U.S.
military force and neither had nuclear weapons. North Korea,
however, is a nuclear power, and regime change there has been Kim
Jong-Un succeeding his father, Kim Jong-Il, when he died from a
heart attack in December 2011. So Stuxnet or not, the reality is
that Iran is more likely than not to continue its quest for
nukes.

And — as undesirable as it
would be — we could live with a nuclear-armed Iran.
North Korea has nukes, and the world as we know it has not come to
an end. Unless the mullahs in Tehran are suicidal — and
there’s no apparent reason to believe they are — Iran is
no more likely to use a nuclear weapon than North Korea. Even if
you believe Iran is bent on destroying Israel, you also have to
believe that the regime would be willing to pay the price of total
self-destruction to achieve that end. The regime in Tehran may be
hard-line and fundamentalist, but so were Stalin and Mao — yet
we successfully deterred them both.

Moreover, engaging in actions
such as Stuxnet — which we would consider an act of war if we
were on the receiving end — could ultimately spark a real war.
That could actually be worse than a nuclear-armed Iran.

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